Bank of America Asked Twitter To Delete A Journalist’s Tweet, and Twitter Said Yes

LEON NEAL/AFP/Getty Images23 Dec 2015

Jim Edwards, the founding editor of Business Insider UK, has been forced to delete a tweet after Bank of America claimed he violated their copyright.

In a post on Business Insider, Edwards said the bank sent him an email informing him that Twitter had deleted two tweets about the bank on the grounds of copyright violation. The bank also claimed they would ensure his entire Twitter account was deleted if he did not comply with the request.

Edwards had posted a picture of a small excerpt of Bank of America analyst Teo Lasarte’s notes to clients, along with a humorous Twitter message suggesting he had developed a “pun-based method for analysing auto stocks.” This was the basis of a DMCA request from Attributor Corporation, a digital rights management company.

Edwards speculated that the company was sending out DMCA notices on behalf of Bank of America en masse, and that his situation was probably down to an error in the system. The email sent to Edwards in fact told him that two tweets had been deleted – but the URL provided for one of them linked to a different Twitter account.

For those who already suspect Twitter to be corrupt, news of the ease with which big banks can have journalists’ tweets deleted will do little to improve confidence in the platform. Edwards has appealed the deletion of his tweet through Twitter’s systems, and is currently awaiting a response.